One of my closest friends says his love language is deep attention. When I’m confused about a situation, he listens to what I have to say, directs me with careful questions, and then goes away for a few hours. Eventually, he comes back with a question or framing that slices through my fog. I treasure his speech deeply. The attention that undergirds... See more

The era we live in requires us to take trust leaps at a surprisingly high rate – we have jumped from using credit cards to dabbling with cryptocurrencies; from making reservations at trusted hotel brands to booking rooms from complete strangers; from public transportation to using Uber or Blablacar; from libraries and encyclopedias, to open informa... See more

Political risks aside, whatever the blockchain of facts could discover about consensus has already been thoroughly demonstrated by Trump Tweets. Trump Tweets have shown us that access to, obviousness of, and even universal agreement on the facts often achieves nothing for public discourse. Everyone agrees on the exact words he said, but their inter

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Rituals can be defined as temporal technologies for housing oneself. They turn being in the world into being at home. Rituals are in time as things are in space. They stabilize life by structuring time. They give us festive spaces, so to speak, spaces we can enter in celebration. As temporal structures, rituals arrest time. Temporal spaces we ... See more

Now, though, I realize that this confusion stems from making the same mistake I did in that old analysis of Facebook: I was looking to the real world as a guide to understanding the Internet, when it was in fact inevitable that the Internet would, over time, come to impact the real world. Some of that impact will be fleeting, like many of the prote... See more

This image appears in two channels,  Sublime  and  Feeling Futuristic . You can probably start to guess what these two channels are getting at, but it takes visiting both of them to understand the nuances of their content. While  Feeling Futuristic often feels like some combination of wonderment, apocolyptic visions, and specul

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What Eno likes about 77 Million Paintings is that he has no idea what will appear on screen, nor what aesthetic effects will be produced. "That's pretty interesting. But what interests me more is the way people experience them. My shows are not narratives. Nothing much happens yet people come and stay for hours in a contemplative state. I thought, ... See more

The key to Clubhouse’s rapid accession is that its social design makes it an ideal platform for cults at a time when the social internet is rapidly evolving away from organizing around communities and toward cults. Clubhouse’s rise likely signals major strategic shifts that several legacy social platforms are going to have to consider.

The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal s... See more